The car

It was quite a day, as I basically bought a car today! It's a Royal Blue Pearl Acura TSX with 6 spd manual transmission. Now I've been told that manual transmissions are only 5% of all the TSX's made, but it's come from so many different sources I wonder if it's one of those myths. Anyways, finding one in manual and not-black I figured would be tough, but this dealer in Indy had it and offered me invoice for it. Good enough for me!

I blogged earlier about the bad sales service I was getting from the dealers... Well this guy seemed to be on the right track. At first he said it didn't show up on inventory, so I'd either hafta order it or go with a different color. This was the first time a salesman actually tried to offer me up that option... i.e. trying to solve my problem instead of dismissing it. He also went and found this car, which was not actually ordered by the dealer but Acura had sent them anyway (how that works I'll never get it).

Since he's in Indianapolis, I wanted to make sure they weren't gonna pull a bait and switch on me. So I asked for something in writing that basically said that my deposit was going towards a car with those exact things. He faxed that to me and got his sales manager to sign it. The wording wasn't quite what I expected (it still said my depost was non-refundable) so I asked him to change it. He happily complied, and said he understood why. I talked to him on the phone, and the guy seemed like a normal guy trying to help me out instead of the slick and slimy car salesman (there were a couple that I dealt with like that) or the older sophisticated guy who didn't want to budge on the price and didn't really want to spend the time with me. I think Karen would approve of this guy's sales tactics more than all the other guys.

I'll wait until I actually pick up the car, due in late February (it's probably on ship somewhere in the Pacific Ocean) before I give him the official reco for you guys. But I'm excited and can't wait for it to get here!